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The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#131

Post by stuntkite »

empath75 wrote: post #115
k__ wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can live entirely from investments you're rich.

Exactly this. I make well into six figures, but only recently. I’ve got a bunch of student loan debt to pay off, I don’t own a house. If I got laid off tomorrow, my family would have serious financial problems within a few months of living off of savings. I’m doing well, but I’m by no means rich. Now give me another ten years and it’s a different story.

I've made six figures going on three years now. I came from nothing. I was an emancipated minor at 15, made every mistake I possibly could from there to 35(now). I'm climbing out from under it quickly in some respects. My teeth are getting fixed, I'm paying off debt, etc. I know for a fact that I'm one bad lift and twist moving a couch or peculiar mental/physical incident from being homeless.

When I fret to my partner, she says "Honey, you're being to hard on yourself, we are doing great!" But when I look at the stakes and the people I know; The only ones insulated have established families. Having established family even has it's own curse in this day and age. Insulated, sure, but kids that are too insulated via trust fund can get stuck in this weird developmental purgatory that even though they have and won't want, it's hard to find meaning or even give a shit to look for it and take on the risk for what it's worth if they weren't groomed. I've seen lack of meaning take lives.

In the next year I might break loose because I have some ownership in something interesting, but I'm acutely aware of how much it costs to transcend being the wretched of the earth. The treadmill we are on as a human race isn't sustainable. Something I think the article points out succinctly is that with greater inequality we all lose. His grandmother bet it all on the dot com boom and went to work at Wendy's. Anything that isn't an ivy league education is indentured servitude.

I'm lucky to have technology and because I have it, I guess all I can see is potentially a technological equalizer in the near future (at least I hope we can find it near), but we are all being fleeced no matter how you shake it. Globally we are in a race condition similar to a drug addict who didn't realize they were that far gone getting fired from their job. Yeah, the apartment and the girlfriend are up next. But, we have plenty of lies to stack up before then to mask like it's the status quo. This problem is going to take a good think to get solved and we'll need to get high and tight to deal with the stress.

We can still pawn grandpa's coin collection to get a fix this weekend. We'll be back on top before anyone notices.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#132

Post by doktrin »

jokoon wrote: post #38
anbende wrote: post #2

Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. The author tries to make the point that “the 9.9%” have the majority of the wealth and this issue is as big or bigger than the concentration of wealth at the very top. The problem is that this is largely an artifact of the division system. The distribution is highly skewed, and the…

I disagree. What the article is trying to point out is that the 9.9% thinks he's not so wealthy, so he is against inequality, but he still, somehow, for his own comfort and merit belief system, likes his higher income. Trying to talk about ranges of income, would it the top N%, is pointless. You could strip out the hypocrisy like so: "I am not at the top, so I am still against inequality, but I am comfortable, but si…

> I'm sure those 9.9% would be very surprised they belong to the top 10%

Someone with over $1 million in assets is going to be surprised they're in the top 10% of the country? I don't buy it.

> You could strip out the hypocrisy like so: "I am not at the top, so I am still against inequality, but I am comfortable, but since I AM NOT AT THE TOP, YOU CANNOT BLAME ME, so blame the richest"

My read of the article was almost the exact opposite, namely that the author was trying to call attention to the fact that the "top 9.9%" is in fact very much to blame, as evidenced by his concluding remarks :

"It’s going to take something from each of us, too, and perhaps especially from those who happen to be the momentary winners of this cycle in the game. We need to peel our eyes away from the mirror of our own success and think about what we can do in our everyday lives for the people who aren’t our neighbors."

> but you know, at least I don't complain because when I compare it to the rest of the world, being in the lower 50% or 60% or 30% in a modern and developed country is still a pretty good life.

On the one hand, it's nice that you have a sense of perspective and can appreciate that you live a more comfortable life than most of the world's population.

On the other, there's a fine line between a stiff upper lip and stoic complacency. There will always be a greater evil somewhere in the world. Just because Mogadishu is more dangerous than my neighborhood doesn't mean I'm cool with people getting robbed outside my house.

Put more plainly : you have the right to ignore issues in your local community, but you should not try to shame others into silence simply because they're not starving.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#133

Post by adventured »

fpig wrote: post #86

If you pick 4.73% or 17.23% as the cutoff point you will reach the same conclusions, the numbers behave as you would expect. I read a similar article once that focused on the top 20% by income, this one focuses on top 10% by wealth... The reality is that there is no "aristocratic cutoff point" - people get richer (and their incomes go up) faster smoothly as you go towards the right on the curve. I don't understand wh…

It's meant to expand the class warfare numbers, that's the sole purpose of moving the goalpost from the 1% to the 10%.

You could just as easily set the line at the top 1/3, because that group in the US is better off than any top 1/3 in any other nation. The US controls ~35% of all wealth on earth, with 4% of the population; that wealth is almost all stacked among the top ~85 million adults - a bit more than 1% of the world's population. Among those 85 million adults, there are over 11 million millionaires [1]. Nothing like that mass affluence exists anywhere else. So if you really wanted to push the class warfare game to its inevitable conclusion, you'd pit the majority bottom 2/3 against the minority top 1/3. If you were a nefarious type, this also works particularly well because it pits whites & asians against blacks & hispanics, as those groups largely divide by those income/wealth lines.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans...

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#134

Post by refurb »

k__ wrote: post #106
refurb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup! Asking someone "How much money makes a person rich?" is like asking someone "How many drinks makes you an alcoholic?". The answer is typically "Someone who drinks more than I do."

If you can live entirely from investments you're rich.

Let me guess, you can't entirely live off your investments? ;)

Not sure I agree though. So someone who makes $1M per year from their work, but has no investments isn't rich?

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#135

Post by bhawks »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #128
bhawks wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this amount to a systemic transfer of wealth from young to old (OP's complaint?)? Student loan growth correlates to the (seemingly unbounded) rise of college costs, along with the willingness of the Government to back loans for them? I'd argue that college costs are rising specifically because it's so easy for students to get loans because of Government intervention. :( Also to be considered is that it used to b…

One still has a generation who were educated on subsidised education now reducing those subsidies, per capita, to the next. The former then expects the latter to work to fund their Social Security, Medicare and pensions as opposed to working to redistribute those hand-outs over the broader population. (Not taking a stance. Simply eliding a policy theme. My bet is SS, Medicare and pensions will be dismantled within a…

There has been no reduction of education spending on a per-capita basis (or any other form of measurement).

https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_202...

It has grown at an amazing rate (as have Medicare/pensions etc).

Half of the income of the middle 20% of retired folks (those making less than $65K) comes from the government subsidies you'd like to cut. The 2nd 20% gets 2/3rds their income from the government and the bottom gets practically all of it. Cuts here will materially impact the poorest elderly.

Citations: https://usafacts.org/reports/annual/2018

My personal TL;DR is that we've been throwing money at all these problems and they are still so far from being solved :( Actually throwing money around seems to make things much worse.

People are taking a NIMBY style stance (cut those programs I don't use and give me/people like me the difference -- definitely don't cut my programs) that is not going to achieve anything but further animosity and grief :(

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#136

Post by reggieband »

roywiggins wrote: post #121
reggieband wrote: post #108

This was a very long article so it doesn't surprise me that most people are commenting on the 9.9% figure while missing the authors point. I've seen a similar point made several times recently and it goes something like this: The "true elites" have constructed a social and economic system that syphons off the majority of wealth. The "wannabe elites" at the top of the remaining pile are actually complicit servants of…

This tripartite split (elite, bourgeois, poor) is a very old one. I am sure I read a paper in an undergrad poly-sci course that analyzed the fate of nations based on which two teamed up against the third. Elites+poor is a pretty dangerous combination because they end up catching civil society in the pincers.

The author did make the argument that revolutions that start from the middle are usually less violent and chaotic. I don't have the relevant education to know if that is true but I do know that I'd rather lead a revolution than be the victim of it. To be fair to the author, that is his ultimate point.

It feels to me that the idea of sacrifice has become a secular heresy. Humility as well. If the middle class has any hope of allying with the lower class then those two traits will have to ascend from ashes. The real questions is: are we too far gone and is it too late?

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#137

Post by k__ »

refurb wrote: post #134
k__ wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can live entirely from investments you're rich.

Let me guess, you can't entirely live off your investments? ;) Not sure I agree though. So someone who makes $1M per year from their work, but has no investments isn't rich?

Isn't this a strawman?

Clearly someone who makes $1M could live of their investments.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#138

Post by doktrin »

Latteland wrote: post #90
Aeolun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing 1.2 million to enter the top 10% gives some indication of the wealth these people have though.

I'm intrigued by thinking about wealth vs income. To get to the 1% in income takes $250k a year, apparently 195k gets you to the top 2%. So in Seattle, that means that almost every software engineer at a big company (amazon, facebook, microsoft, google, etc) with 10 or 15 years of experience is probably in the 1%. Thousands and thousands of people. If I was a dental hygienist like my mom, or a teacher, I'd be middle…

> We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are

This only applies to a small fraction of engineers clustered in a literal handful of geographic areas. I personally don't know a single engineer in my country that makes $200k (and the cost of living here is just as high as any major US city). Earning half that is seen as a very good salary.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#139

Post by Latteland »

seibelj wrote: post #58
distances wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous power. Could you elaborate what you mean by this? Wouldn't the best course of action to give each school the same funding based on the number of pupils, and additional funding for troubled areas in need?

I think that we should let students from poor towns go to awesome schools in rich towns even if they aren’t residents of the rich town. The wealthy self-segregate by limiting low-income housing in their area to keep out the poors. Similarly I think it should be easy to create a new school (charter or whatever you want to call it) to compete with bad schools in poor districts. But even without option 2, option 1 would…

In my experience people who want charter schools want one of two things, either to send tax money to a religious school, or to destroy the public school employees. There's a lot of actual knowledge and infrastructure behind running a public school. It's sounds appealing that you can do better than some terrible big city trouble-bound public school, and we should all strive for better educational opportunities, but the charter schools consistently show now benefit and generally worse results than public schools. And that's not from lack of funding from the billionaire class. For example, see https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED528633.pdf. That seems pretty settled.

I think a more productive question is what can we do to help under-performing public schools. My suggestion is more funding to help the kids from underprivileged backgrounds catch up. That includes free breakfast and lunch, food to take home on the weekends, pre-K education, more resources for the school including reducing class sizes.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#140

Post by Latteland »

doktrin wrote: post #138
Latteland wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm intrigued by thinking about wealth vs income. To get to the 1% in income takes $250k a year, apparently 195k gets you to the top 2%. So in Seattle, that means that almost every software engineer at a big company (amazon, facebook, microsoft, google, etc) with 10 or 15 years of experience is probably in the 1%. Thousands and thousands of people. If I was a dental hygienist like my mom, or a teacher, I'd be middle…

> We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are This only applies to a small fraction of engineers clustered in a literal handful of geographic areas. I personally don't know a single engineer in my country that makes $200k (and the cost of living here is just as high as any major US city). Earning half that is seen as a very good salary.

Well, I did say Seattle. Yes, I'm fortunate. I did move here for a good job 20 years ago. I would expect that west coast salary increases should also pull up the entire market.
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